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| Cisco CCNA Certification |
Build Your Own Cisco Lab:
There are many alternatives to purchasing equipment that you may outgrow or that may not meet your future requirements for Cisco training. While it is highly recommend that you work on the equipment to get hands-on knowledge, at some point, the cost to do that will most probably far exceed your desired spending level.
If you are going to purchase equipment then you must verify before you buy that it will support the IOS version(s) you plan to use. Be careful with buying things on eBay... there have been situations when people have bought routers and then needed to buy memory upgrades before they could install IOS v 11.x, which requires 8mb RAM. Two routers will work fine for CCNA but you are going to need at least three to accomplish many of the CCNP requirements and simulate the environments.
An alternative is to utilize the web where there are sites that let you access (i.e. rent) live or simulated routers. Check out SimRouter.com and RouterSim.com. These sites should give you an idea of the different types of offerings that are available and the costs involved. SimRouter.com also allows you to use workbooks written by Laura Chappell that go right along with their existing lab environment. Laura Chappell's website is NetAnalysis.org and her Cisco lab books can be found at PodBooks.com.
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